TY - JOUR
T1 - On communication protocols that compute almost privately
AU - Comi, Marco
AU - Dasgupta, Bhaskar
AU - Schapira, Michael
AU - Srinivasan, Venkatakumar
PY - 2012/10/26
Y1 - 2012/10/26
N2 - We further investigate and generalize the approximate privacy model recently introduced by Feigenbaum et al. (2010) [7]. We explore the privacy properties of a natural class of communication protocols that we refer to as "dissection protocols". Informally, in a dissection protocol the communicating parties are restricted to answering questions of the form "Is your input between the values α and β (under a pre-defined order over the possible inputs)?". We prove that for a large class of functions, called tiling functions, there always exists a dissection protocol that provides a constant average-case privacy approximation ratio for uniform or "almost uniform" probability distributions over inputs. To establish this result we present an interesting connection between the approximate privacy framework and basic concepts in computational geometry. We show that such a good privacy approximation ratio for tiling functions does not, in general, exist in the worst case. We also discuss extensions of the basic setup to more than two parties and to non-tiling functions, and provide calculations of privacy approximation ratios for two functions of interest.
AB - We further investigate and generalize the approximate privacy model recently introduced by Feigenbaum et al. (2010) [7]. We explore the privacy properties of a natural class of communication protocols that we refer to as "dissection protocols". Informally, in a dissection protocol the communicating parties are restricted to answering questions of the form "Is your input between the values α and β (under a pre-defined order over the possible inputs)?". We prove that for a large class of functions, called tiling functions, there always exists a dissection protocol that provides a constant average-case privacy approximation ratio for uniform or "almost uniform" probability distributions over inputs. To establish this result we present an interesting connection between the approximate privacy framework and basic concepts in computational geometry. We show that such a good privacy approximation ratio for tiling functions does not, in general, exist in the worst case. We also discuss extensions of the basic setup to more than two parties and to non-tiling functions, and provide calculations of privacy approximation ratios for two functions of interest.
KW - Approximate privacy
KW - Binary space partition
KW - Multi-party communication
KW - Tiling
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=84865500745&partnerID=8YFLogxK
U2 - 10.1016/j.tcs.2012.07.008
DO - 10.1016/j.tcs.2012.07.008
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AN - SCOPUS:84865500745
SN - 0304-3975
VL - 457
SP - 45
EP - 58
JO - Theoretical Computer Science
JF - Theoretical Computer Science
ER -